Page 2748 - Week 09 - Thursday, 26 August 1993
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The conference was well attended and included representatives from all States and Territories, as well as from New Zealand and Canada. The only State not represented was Western Australia, which had not yet been able to form its committee following the recent election. The most important remarks of the conference came, strangely enough, from a member from the town I was born in, Adrian Cruickshank, the chairman of the Regulation Review Committee in New South Wales. Mr Cruickshank related a conversation he overheard about politicians. A person was complaining to a politician that all politicians were lazy and did not work hard enough. The comments were based on the amount of time parliaments were in session. The individual did not believe that parliaments were in session for long enough. The politician, who was a Minister, said that the complainant should realise that the more the parliament sits the more laws we pass for people to have to keep. I think this was a very interesting remark. This is a problem the ACT legislators face as well.
There is underlying concern that parliaments are passing too much primary and subordinate legislation. This concern is based on a number of grounds. Firstly, for laws to be effective they should be well understood. However, changing laws consistently, particularly through subordinate legislation, makes it difficult for people to keep track of exactly what the law is or what the fine is. As an example of this, can anybody in the Assembly, apart from the Minister responsible, tell us the fee for residential building permits or the contents of the most recent regulations under the Milk Authority Act? Even I am not sure that I know those, and I am not sure that anybody other than the Minister, who is sitting beside me, would be able to relate those to me. I can see by the look on his face that he is not quite sure, that he will seek advice. I do not condemn the Minister for this. This is exactly the point I am making. If we cannot remember, if we do not know, imagine what is happening to the people outside.
Secondly, the different laws and subordinate legislation impose both a direct and an indirect cost to the individual outside this house. Has anybody thought about that? Direct costs are borne by government and by individuals affected by fees and charges. People are also affected by indirect costs - for example, the costs of complying with rules and procedures. This is something that, as a parliament, we need to come to terms with, and we should be looking at this. It is great that we have self-government, but we are coming into the twenty-first century and we seem to be looking at how many laws we can make, how many rules we can make. Even lawyers complain that they cannot keep up, so you can imagine what happens to the ordinary individual or the ordinary voter outside.
The conference passed seven resolutions. These reflected the bulk of the content of the proceedings. The first called for the establishment of a working party to report on the desirability of establishing uniform principles on scrutiny of Bills and regulations, as well as aiming for the mutual recognition and harmonisation of statutes and regulations. This, I believe, is a sensible approach to achieving uniformity of scrutiny between parliaments, thus making it more effective. Additionally, it should lead to differences in laws between regions of Australia being reduced. One of the things that came up at the conference was the fact that each State has so many different laws. If we did have uniform regulations you would know, when you crossed the border into another State, that the law was the same there as it was in Queanbeyan or in Shepparton or in Adelaide or in the ACT. One of the most frightening things in America is that from State to State the laws are so different that people need to know exactly what the law of each State is before they move there.
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